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I recently ran into a problem with gulp-sass, whereby some of the partials that were being included in my main .scss file were intermittently not being found. Gulp would throw up the error: file to import not found or unreadable: somefilename What's odd about this is that not only did the files in question exist, but if I simply went in and saved any file at all that was being 'watched' by Gulp - triggering a refresh of the gulp-sass task - the files would miracuously be found and everything would work fine! Doing a bit of Googling I found…

Following on from my recent post where I detailed my approach to CFC organisation, I wanted to share some more details of my current CFML coding methodology. Today I’m going to talk a little about database interaction. Unless you’re taking advantage of ORM in your CF application, you will most likely have to spend a bit of time scaffolding your components with some standard CRUD functionality. Some developers like to use a single component to manage all database interactivity, but I tend towards creating functions for each individual component. The goal is to have a standardised set of…

I’ve been thinking recently about my coding style. I’m always interested in doing things in the most elegant and efficient way possible and the methodology I use these days is a result of many years of experimentation and refinement. I think a coding style, from formatting and file structure to app conceptualisation; is a delicate balance between personal preference and the conventional wisdom of our peers. Well structured and thought out code is easy to maintain and a joy to return to, but inconsistent code can easily become unwieldy. I wanted to share some examples of the way…

I came across a post by Adam Cameron today regarding migrating away from CFML, and the possibility of helping others to do so with some kind of project similar to the excellent ColdFusion UI the Right Way - showing how common CF functionality could be replicated in other languages. I still love CFML, but I can't deny that the community has gotten smaller over recent years and some of the work I've had of late has involved helping to maintain legacy CF based systems while new ones are being built in some other language. I'm certainly not against moving to…

ZCash launched on October 28th among some of the craziest price volatility imaginable. Here’s how I got on, mining to a ZCash pool on a Windows GPU mining rig. I’ve been playing around with Bitcoin and alt currency mining since 2013, initially building a couple of GPU rigs to mine Litecoin and then diversifying across all manner of coins and algorithms. I’ve been mining Ethereum for some time and until recently no new coin launch has caught my attention enough to move my hashing power. Recently however, I couldn’t help but notice the hype surrounding ZCash.…

I’ve been dabbling in HTML5 game development with Phaser.io for the last few months and along the way I got wind of the Ludum Dare game jam. For those who’ve not heard of LD, this is a 72 hour (or 48 if you’re brave) game jam held three times a year. The community decide on a theme, announced at the beginning of the jam, and developers of all ages and experience levels spend a weekend creating a game to fit. Along the way, people post updates of how their game development is going, and offer inspiration…

Anyone brave/stupid/stubborn (delete as applicable) enough to dare to run Wordpress on Windows and IIS, is likely to have run headlong into the brick wall that is NTFS file permissions. The language I'm using here is deliberately ironic. Even in 2016 the level of help you can expect when searching online for Wordpress / IIS configurations is abysmal. The attitude of a great many contributors amounts to the following: "Why are you using Windows (you idiot)? Don't use that, use LAMP (DUH!) and don't come around here no more, asking your Windozy questions like a n00b... it's called CHMOD,…

So I've been dabbling for a while in HTML5 game development, specifically using the Phaser framework. I've been documenting my progress offline for a few weeks and I'd like to post this online at some point... For now though, I wanted to write a post about using Phaser’s particle emitter to create an explosion effect that I think’s worked out really well. The effect combines a single explosion animation, with a particle emitter to make multiple semi-random explosions which really beefs up the effect. The graphics I’ve been using for B-Type came from GameDevMarket and along with…

I just couldn’t leave it alone... So only one day after setting up my blog on a cloud hosted Ghost instance, I’ve found myself trawling through blogs and documentation on a voyage of discovery – with the intent of hosting Ghost on my own NodeJS server. Why?! You may want to just skip to the instructions. When I made the decision to go with Ghost, the thinking was that I didn’t want to get bogged down in the creation of a website or management of blog software... instead reasoning that the content I wanted to post should take…

Ahh January... It's that wonderful time of year that's just pregnant with promise. The time of new beginnings, new undertakings. Change for the better. It's no wonder that new gym membership subscriptions soar at this time of year. The sad truth is of course, that all our good intentions and indeed our enthusiasm for them, generally peters out by about mid-February. Not this time though! Let us live in this delusion a little while longer, as I explain that in 2016 I've decided to create my own little space on the web, in the guise of the delightful blog you…